Life After Life (15 page)

‘So I rather miss seeing you,’ Izzie said, ‘which is why I asked if you could come up for the day. To be frank, I was surprised Sylvie agreed. There’s always been a certain, shall we say,
froideur
between your mother and myself. I, of course, am considered mad, bad and dangerous to know. Anyway I thought I should try to single you out from the herd, as it were. You remind me a little of me.’ (Was that a good thing, Ursula wondered?) ‘We could be special chums, what do you think? Pamela’s a little dull,’ Izzie continued. ‘All that tennis and cycling, no wonder she has such sturdy ankles.
Très sportive
, I’m sure, but still. And science! No fun in that. And the boys are, well … boys, but you’re interesting, Ursula. All that funny stuff in your head about knowing the future. Quite the little clairvoyant. Perhaps we should set you up in a gypsy caravan, get you a crystal ball, Tarot cards.
The drowned Phoenician sailor
and all that. You can’t see anything in my future, can you?’

‘No.’

‘Reincarnation,’ Dr Kellet had said to her. ‘Have you heard of that?’ Ursula, aged ten, shook her head. She had heard of very little. Dr Kellet had a nice set of rooms in Harley Street. The one that he showed Ursula into was half panelled in mellow oak, with a thick carpet figured in red and blue on the floor and two large leather armchairs either side of a well-stoked coal fire. Dr Kellet himself wore a three-piece Harris tweed suit strung with a large gold fob watch. He smelt of cloves and pipe tobacco and had a twinkly look about him as if he were going to toast muffins or read a particularly good story to her, but instead he beamed at Ursula and said, ‘So, I hear you tried to kill your maid?’ (Oh, that’s why I’m here, Ursula thought.)

He offered her tea which he brewed in something called a samovar in the corner of the room. ‘Although I’m not Russian, far from it, I’m from Maidstone, I visited St Petersburg before the Revolution.’ He was like Izzie in that he treated you as a grown-up, or at least he appeared to, but that was where the resemblance ended. The tea was black and bitter and only drinkable with the aid of heaps of sugar and the contents of the tin of Huntley and Palmer’s Marie biscuits that sat between them on a little table.

He had trained in Vienna (‘where else?’) but trod, he said, his own path. He was no one’s disciple, he said, although he had studied ‘at the feet of all of the teachers. One must nose forward,’ he said. ‘Nudge one’s way through the chaos of our thoughts. Unite the divided self.’ Ursula had no idea what he was talking about.

‘The maid? You pushed her down the stairs?’ It seemed a very direct question for someone who talked about nosing and nudging.

‘It was an accident.’ She didn’t think of Bridget as ‘the maid’, she thought of her as Bridget. And it was ages ago now.

‘Your mother is worried about you.’

‘I just want you to be happy, darling,’ Sylvie said after she had made the appointment with Dr Kellet.

‘Aren’t I happy?’ Ursula puzzled.

‘What do you think?’

Ursula didn’t know. She wasn’t sure that she had a yardstick against which to measure happiness or unhappiness. She had obscure memories of elation, of falling into darkness, but they belonged to that world of shadows and dreams that was ever-present and yet almost impossible to pin down.

‘As if there is another world?’ Dr Kellet said.

‘Yes. But it’s this one as well.’

(‘I know she says the oddest things, but a
psychiatrist
?’ Hugh said to Sylvie. He frowned. ‘She’s only small. She’s not
defective
.’

‘Of course not. She just needs a little fixing.’)

‘And, hey presto, you’re fixed! How marvellous,’ Izzie said. ‘He was an odd little bod, that mind doctor, wasn’t he? Shall we essay the cheese board – the Stilton’s so ripe it looks as if it’s about to walk away of its own accord – or shall we tootle off and go to mine?’

‘I’m stuffed,’ Ursula said.

‘Me too. Tootle off it is then. Shall I pick up the bill?’

‘I have no money. I’m thirteen,’ Ursula reminded her.

They left the restaurant and, to Ursula’s astonishment, Izzie sauntered a few yards up the Strand and climbed into the driver’s seat of a gleaming open-top car, parked, rather carelessly, outside the Coal Hole. ‘You have a car!’ Ursula exclaimed.

‘Good, isn’t it? Not
exactly
paid for. Hop in. A Sunbeam, sports model. Certainly beats driving an ambulance. Wonderful in this weather. Shall we take the scenic route, go along the Embankment?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘Ah, the Thames,’ Izzie said when the river came into view. ‘The nymphs, sadly, are all departed.’ It was a lovely late-September afternoon, crisp as an apple. ‘London’s glorious, isn’t it?’ Izzie said. She drove as if she were on the circuit at Brooklands. It was both terrifying and exhilarating. Ursula supposed that if Izzie had managed to drive throughout the war unscathed then they would probably make it along the Victoria Embankment without coming to grief.

As they approached Westminster Bridge they had to slow down on account of the crowds of people whose flow had been interrupted by a largely silent demonstration of unemployed men.
I fought overseas
, a placard held aloft read. Another proclaimed
Hungry and wanting to work
. ‘They’re so meek,’ Izzie said dismissively. ‘There’ll never be a revolution in this country. Not another one at any rate. We chopped the head off a king once and felt so guilty about it that we’ve been trying to make up for it ever since.’ A shabby-looking man came up alongside the car and shouted something incomprehensible at Izzie, although the meaning was clear.

‘
Qu’ils mangent de la brioche
,’ Izzie murmured. ‘You know she never said that, don’t you? Marie-Antoinette? She’s a rather maligned figure in history. You must never believe everything they say about a person. Generally speaking, most of it will be lies, half-truths at best.’ It was hard to figure out whether Izzie was a royalist or a republican. ‘Best not to adhere too closely to one side or the other really,’ she said.

Big Ben tolled a solemn three o’clock as the Sunbeam pushed its way through the throng. ‘
Si lunga tratta di gente, ch’io non avrei mai creduto che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta
. Have you read Dante? You should. He’s very good.’ How did Izzie know so much? ‘Oh,’ she said airily. ‘Finishing school. And I spent some time in Italy after the war. I took a lover, of course. An impoverished count, it’s more or less
de rigueur
when you’re over there. Are you shocked?’

‘No.’ She was. Ursula wasn’t surprised there was a
froideur
between her mother and Izzie.

‘Reincarnation is at the heart of Buddhist philosophy,’ Dr Kellet would say, sucking on his meerschaum pipe. All conversations with Dr Kellet were punctuated by this object, whether by gesture – a great deal of pointing with both mouthpiece and Turk’s-head bowl (fascinating in itself) – or the necessary ritual of emptying, filling, tamping, lighting and so on. ‘Have you heard of Buddhism?’ She hadn’t.

‘How old are you?’

‘Ten.’

‘Still quite new. Perhaps you’re remembering another life. Of course, the disciples of the Buddha don’t believe that you keep coming back as the
same
person in the
same
circumstances, as you feel you do. You move on, up or down, sideways occasionally, I expect. Nirvana is the goal. Non-being, as it were.’ At ten it seemed to Ursula that perhaps
being
should be the goal. ‘Most ancient religions,’ he continued, ‘adhered to an idea of circularity – the snake with its tail in its mouth, and so on.’

‘I’ve been confirmed,’ she said, trying to be helpful. ‘Church of England.’

Dr Kellet had come to Sylvie recommended by Mrs Shawcross via Major Shawcross, their next-door neighbour. Kellet had done a lot of good work, the major said, with men who ‘needed help’ after they returned from the war (there was a suggestion that the major himself had ‘needed help’). Ursula’s path crossed occasionally with some of these other patients. Once there was a dejected young man who stared at the carpet in the waiting room speaking quietly to himself, another who tapped his foot restlessly in time to something only he could hear. Dr Kellet’s receptionist, Mrs Duckworth, who was a war widow and had been a nurse during the war, was always very nice to Ursula, offering her peppermints and asking her about her family. One day a man blundered into the waiting room, although the doorbell downstairs had never rung. He looked bewildered and a little wild but he just stood stock-still in the middle of the room, staring at Ursula as if he’d never seen a child before, until Mrs Duckworth led him to a chair and sat down next to him and then put her arm round him and said, ‘Now, now, Billy what is it?’ the way a nice mother would have done and Billy laid his head on her chest and began to sob.

If Teddy ever cried when he was younger, Ursula could never bear it. It seemed to open up a chasm inside, something deep and dreadful and full of sorrow. All she ever wanted was to make sure he never felt like crying again. The man in Dr Kellet’s waiting room had the same effect on her. (‘That’s how motherhood feels every day,’ Sylvie said.)

Dr Kellet came out of his room at that moment and said, ‘Come along, Ursula, I’ll see to Billy later,’ but when Ursula finished her appointment Billy was no longer in the waiting room. ‘Poor man,’ Mrs Duckworth said sadly.

The war, Dr Kellet said to Ursula, had made many people search for meaning in new places – ‘Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, anthroposophy, spiritualism. Everyone needs to make sense of their loss.’ Dr Kellet himself had sacrificed a son, Guy, a captain in the Royal West Surreys, lost at Arras. ‘One must hold on to the idea of sacrifice, Ursula. It can be a higher calling.’ He showed her a photograph, not one taken in uniform, just a snapshot really, of a boy in cricket whites, standing proudly behind his bat. ‘Could have played for the county,’ Dr Kellet said sadly. ‘I like to think of him – of all of them – playing a never-ending game in heaven. A perfect afternoon in June, always just before they break for tea.’

It seemed a shame for all the young men never to have their tea. Bosun was in heaven, along with Sam Wellington, the old boot, and Clarence Dodds, who had died with astonishing speed of the Spanish flu the day after the Armistice. Ursula couldn’t imagine any of them playing cricket.

‘Of course, I don’t believe in God,’ Dr Kellet said. ‘But I believe in heaven. One has to,’ he added, rather bleakly. Ursula wondered how all of this was supposed to fix her.

‘From a more scientific point of view,’ he said, ‘perhaps the part of your brain responsible for memory has a little flaw, a neurological problem that leads you to think that you are repeating experiences. As if something had got stuck.’ She wasn’t really dying and being reborn, he said, she just
thought
she was. Ursula couldn’t see what the difference was.
Was
she stuck? And if so, where?

‘But we don’t want it to result in you killing the poor servants, do we?’

‘But it was such a long time ago,’ Ursula said. ‘It’s not as if I’ve tried to kill anyone since.’

‘Down in the dumps,’ Sylvie said at their first meeting with Dr Kellet, the only time she had been to the Harley Street rooms with Ursula although she had clearly already talked to him
without
Ursula. Ursula wondered very much what had been said about her. ‘And she’s rather forlorn all the time,’ Sylvie continued. ‘I can understand an adult feeling like that—’

‘Can you?’ Dr Kellet said, leaning forward, the meerschaum indicating interest. ‘Do
you
?’

‘I’m not the problem,’ Sylvie said with her most gracious smile.

I’m a problem, Ursula thought? And anyway she hadn’t been
killing
Bridget, she was
saving
her. And if she wasn’t saving her perhaps she was sacrificing her. Hadn’t Dr Kellet himself said sacrifice was a higher calling?

‘If I were you I would stick to traditional moral guidelines,’ he said. ‘Fate isn’t in your hands. That would be a very heavy burden for a little girl.’ He got up from his chair and put another shovel of coal on the fire.

‘There are some Buddhist philosophers (a branch referred to as Zen) who say that sometimes a bad thing happens to prevent a worse thing happening,’ Dr Kellet said. ‘But, of course, there are some situations where it’s impossible to imagine anything worse.’ Ursula supposed he was thinking of Guy,
lost at Arras
and then denied his tea and cucumber sandwiches for eternity.

‘Try this,’ Izzie said, squirting a perfume atomizer in Ursula’s direction. ‘Chanel Number 5. It’s quite the thing.
She’s
quite the thing.
Her strange, synthetic perfumes
.’ She laughed as if she had made a great joke and sprayed another invisible cloud around the bathroom. It was quite different from the flowery scents that Sylvie anointed herself with.

They had finally arrived at Izzie’s flat in Basil Street (‘rather a dull
endroit
but handy for Harrods’). Izzie’s bathroom was pink and black marble (‘I designed it myself, delicious, isn’t it?’) and was all sharp lines and hard corners. Ursula hated to think what would happen if you slipped and fell in here.

Everything in the flat seemed to be new and shiny. It was nothing like Fox Corner, where the slow-seeming tick of the grandfather clock in the hall counted time and the patina of years shone on the parquet floors. The Meissen figures with their missing fingers and chipped toes, the Staffordshire dogs with accidentally lopped-off ears, bore no resemblance to the Bakelite bookends and onyx ashtrays in Izzie’s rooms. In Basil Street everything looked so new it seemed to belong in a shop. Even the books were new, novels and volumes of essays and poetry by writers Ursula had never heard of. ‘One must keep up with the times,’ Izzie said.

Ursula regarded herself in the bathroom mirror. Izzie stood behind her, Mephistopheles to her Faustus, and said, ‘Goodness, you’re turning out to be quite pretty,’ before rearranging her hair into different styles. ‘You must have it cut,’ she said, ‘you should come to my
coiffeur
. He’s really very good. You’re in danger of looking like a milkmaid, when really I think you’re going to turn out to be deliciously wicked.’